Some rare cheer: millennials are divorcing less than their parents. This might be cause for celebration if the long-term prognosis for marriage wasn’t so poor.
Last year, divorces spiked by ten per cent: 113,505 couples broke up in 2021, compared to 103,592 divorces in 2020, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Divorce laws allowing couples to avoid pinning the blame on each other and backlogs caused by the pandemic are likely to be to blame for the rise in breakups.
Tucked away inside these numbers, however, is a graph that contains a glimmer of good news: millennials are divorcing a lot less after ten years of marriage than their parents and their grandparents.
Generation Xers – the parents of today’s millennials (born 1981 to 1996) – were the most likely to divorce after a decade of wedded bliss, with 23 per cent tapping out in a decade. Baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964) before them did not fare much better, with a divorce rate of 22 per cent after ten years. Millennials, however, are performing admirably. Time will tell whether many of them make it to big anniversaries, but the signs are reassuring: of those marrying, only 18.3 per cent have divorced after ten years of marriage.
Of millennial men who were married by 35, only one in nine were divorced by 45. That figure was nearing one in five for Generation X and more than one in five for baby boomers.
This has left some scratching their heads. It need not: married millennials are doing something they don’t have to do. Few will have peers tutting at them if they shack up and have children out of wedlock. The result is a younger generation being more intentional in their marriage vows. They are marrying because it matters to them, not because society tells them they should.
The larger trend is that marriage has continued to tank. This year, more babies were born to unmarried couples than to married couples by the largest number since records began.
Britain is moving away from marriage in big numbers as couples cohabit rather than marry. This is bad news: the last census showed that almost all parents who stay together until their children reach 15 are married; the updated census will likely tell a similar story. The children of parents who are cohabiting will fare less well. Those relationships are much more likely to break down. Saying so isn’t popular but we need to face the facts.
In the long run, fewer and fewer children look set to grow up in a nuclear family. Yet of those that do, many will have a far lower chance of seeing their parents divorce. This is something politicians need to talk about a lot more, it’s a long time since a major frontline politician made any sort a big pro-marriage statement. Maybe they think voters would be unforgiving but the polling evidence says not. Marriage has become a political taboo and it’s children who suffer in the end.
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